There have been many important economic, political and cultural changes in Asian
countries since the 1960s and 1970s when Geert Hofstede (1980) originally collected and
analyzed data on work-related cultural values. Vietnam, a newly industrialized country, is one of
the most extreme examples of change. With rapid population growth and recent membership in
the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), it signed a trade agreement with the U.S.
in 1999 (Ralston, Thang & Napier, 1999, p. 655). Naisbitt (1996) believes that the most dynamic
growth and the most important changes in the 21st century are in East Asia (e.g., China, Japan,
Taiwan, and Thailand). The West needs the East much more than the East needs the West as the
East modernizes itself, not through Westernization, but in the “Asian way” (Naisbitt, 1996).